Then for an instant, though so alive to her, he seemed to withdraw into remote cogitation, and she wondered whether he was really thinking of the case at all. Because she was in a lawyer's office she called it a case, timorously; that made it much more serious. But Alston, in that instant, was thinking how strange it was that the shabby old office, witness of his unwilling drudgery and his life-saving excursions into the gardens of fiction, should be looking now on her, seated there in her earnestness and purity, and that he should at last be recognising her. She was a part of him, Alston thought, beloved, not because she was so different but so like. There was no assault of the alien nature upon his own, irresistible because so piquing. There were no unexplored tracts he couldn't at least fancy, green swards and clear waters where a man might be refreshed. Everything he found there would be, he knew, of the nature of the approaches to that gentle paradise. What a thing, remote, extraordinary to think of in his office while she brought him the details of a tawdry scandal. Yet the office bore, to his eyes, invisible traces of past occupancy: men and women out of books were there, absolutely vivid to his eyes, more alive than half the Addingtonians. The walls were hung with garlands of fancy, the windows his dreaming eyes had looked from were windows into space beyond Addington. No, these were no common walls, yet unfitting to gaze on while you told a client you loved her. After all, on rapid second thought, it might not seem so inapt seen through his mother's eyes, as she was betraying herself now in more than middle age. "Ask her wherever you find yourselves," he fancied his mother saying. "That is part of the adventure." Alston looked at Anne and smiled upon her and involuntarily she smiled back, though she saw no cause for cheerfulness in the dismal errand she had come on. She started a little, too, for Alston, in the most matter of fact way, began with her first name. "Anne," said he, "I have for a long time been--" he paused for a word. The ones he found were all too dignified, too likely to be wanted in a higher cause--"bewitched," he continued, "over Esther Blake." The colour ran deeper into Anne's face. "You don't want," she said, "to do anything that might hurt her? I shouldn't want to, either. But it isn't Esther we're talking about. It's Madame Beattie." "I know," said Alston, "but I want you to know I have been very much--I've made a good deal of a fool of myself over Mrs. Blake." Still he obstinately would not say he had been in love. Anne, looking at him with the colour rising higher and higher, hardly seemed to understand. But suddenly she did. "You don't mean--" she stammered. "Mr. Choate, she's married, you know, even if she and Jeff aren't together any more. Esther is married."